09 March 2012

Five hundred new fairy tales

A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world...

Von Schönwerth spent decades asking country folk, labourers and servants about local habits, traditions, customs and history, and putting down on paper what had only been passed on by word of mouth. In 1885, Jacob Grimm said this about him: "Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [folklore] so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear."...

One of the new tales is The Turnip Princess. It begins like this...

A young prince lost his way in the forest and came to a cave. He
passed the night there, and when he awoke there stood next to him an old
woman with a bear and a dog. The old witch seemed very beautiful and
wished that the prince would stay with her and marry her. He could not
endure her, yet could not leave that place.

One day, the
bear was alone with him and spoke to the prince: "Pull the rusty nail
from the wall, so that I shall be delivered, and place it beneath a
turnip in the field, and in this way you shall have a beautiful wife."
The prince seized the nail so strongly that the cave shook and the nail
cracked loudly like a clap of thunder. Behind him a bear stood up from
the ground like a man, bearded and with a crown on his head.

3 comments:

It'd be interesting to see how many are just plug-ins of other tales - same plot different characters/settings. The number of basic plot story outlines must be fairly limited, and 500 more would be straining credulity.

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